Fate. Destiny. Kismet. Karma. The belief that Something Else controls
our future; the fear that the future is in reality totally out of control. Within us all there is the uncertainty of what lies awaiting us in the years ahead; while at the same time we are plagued by the unsettling fear that something from the past may come back to haunt us. For some people there is the comfort of spiritual belief; and yet for all of us at some time during our tenuous lives there lies the suspicion that those spiritual beliefs to which we so desperately cling may only scratch the surface of the reality of whatever puppet master is really out there tugging our strings and controlling our dance through life. So girdled with false courage we reach out to grasp the Hand of Fate, and while that hand in turn reaches out to touch all of us, the more elusive Hand of Glory is known to only a few. And when it reaches out it is completely and frighteningly different than its name would let on. Just ask Chris Evans – Outlaw; a man in whose life both the Hand of Fate as well as the Hand of Glory took active roles; a man whose life can certainly be described as fateful, yet a life to which the term of glorious would never be applied. But to understand why the Hand of Glory became a frightening part of his life, we must first go back several years to understand how the Hands of Fate and Glory steered his journey to that painful crossroad. Chris Evans was born back East in the year 1847. He decided to take his destiny into his own hands at the scary age of just fourteen years and ran away from home, making his way West, pausing in his travels occasionally to take on add jobs at farms and ranches but never tarrying for too long in any one place, always desiring to make his way closer to his goal – California. It took him many long years and more than a few detours to finally arrive in the Golden State. But although he had heard about the legends regarding those endless piles of gold just lying around waiting to be picked up, Chris had decided long before his arrival that he didn’t want to spend his life chasing dreams; panning for gold in the freezing mountain streams or digging endlessly in the pitch black darkness of some bottomless hole in a mountainside, chasing phantom riches. He knew instead that he wanted to be on top of those mountains; high up in the Sierra Nevada; as close to heaven as he could get with the world at his feet. So he made his way up to that very place; to an area which is now part of Kings Canyon National Park. The Hand of Fate had only to gently brush him at this point, and the Hand of Glory was still far, far away. Evans soon got a job falling trees – Big Trees, Giant Sequoias – and he was good at it, too. As the years went by – it was the 1870’s now – he taught the trade of tree falling to a lot of the younger men making their way into the mountains in search of employment. Falling trees was hard, even backbreaking work. The loggers worked ten to twelve hours a day, six days per week. It would often take two men working each end of a saw a week or more to fall a single giant tree. But Evans had the strength, the patience, and the stamina to stick with it for many years before he left the mountains and made his way down to the San Joaquin Valley to try his hand at a different kind of work. But when Evans left these hills he also left behind many friends; men who would remember him and come to his aid when Fate would later demand his return to the High Country . Down in the San Joaquin Valley Chris got a job as a teamster and met a wonderful woman named Molly. Molly – quite young by more modern standards at the mere age of fifteen – was considered a woman and eligible for marriage according to the social mores of the time. At twenty-seven Chris was several years her senior, but the two fell in love and entered into a brief yet intense courtship. Molly’s parents gave their blessing and in 1874 she and Chris were married at Rattlesnake Ranch, the Byrd family home which was located about fifteen miles north of Visalia. Chris owned a piece of property near Dry Creek, but instead of moving there with his new bride he worked out a trade for land higher up in the mountains; one hundred and sixty acres in what is now known as Redwood Canyon in Kings Canyon National Park. He and Molly named the place their Redwood Ranch. They moved up there to what they felt was going to be their own personal Garden of Eden to make it their home, and Molly became pregnant with the first of what would eventually be nine children. But after a riding accident the baby was born prematurely and died within a day. Baby Eugene was buried there at Redwood Ranch, beneath a giant Cedar tree next to a small spring of running water, and rests in that grove of Sequoias to this day next to a cousin who also died as an infant. The marker on that grave has long since disappeared, but the remains of their first child still lie somewhere in Redwood Canyon even after Time has erased all physical memories. The search for work soon led Chris to cross the Sierra on foot to Inyo County, while Molly remained at Rattlesnake Ranch and gave birth to their second child several months later. When he returned from the eastern side of the Sierra Chris, Molly and the baby moved back to the valley, then to San Francisco, Seattle, and back again to California to start a farm near a place called Mussel Slough. Although it went unnoticed at this time, this nudge from the Hand of Fate which led them to Mussel Slough was anything but gentle. It was the touch which changed the course of his entire life. Mussel Slough was land which was owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad. But the Southern Pacific invited farmers onto the land to start farms, telling them the railroad would sell them the land after they had improved it. Many families, including the Evans, did just that. Yet the dire events of the near future would soon prove that this may not really have been the best career decision any of them had ever made, and perhaps Chris had a foreboding of those events, and that may have been why he moved his family away from Mussel Slough before it turned into a deadly quagmire. So Chris moved west to Adelaide, and the children kept coming, eight more in all after the passing of baby Eugene – Eva, Carl, Elmer, John, Joseph, Louis, Winifred, and Ynez. Around the year 1880, while Chris and Molly were peacefully ranching and making babies over at Adelaide, trouble erupted at their former home of Mussel Slough between the farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, and although they weren’t involved in that fighting the Southern Pacific branded Chris as a troublemaker because he had friends at Mussel Slough who had taken up arms against the railroad. Six of those friends – six farmers – were killed in the battle that followed between them and the squad of Southern Pacific railroad detectives who had been sent out by the railroad to clear the farmers off the land; to free the land up for sale to other investors at a much higher price than could be gotten from the farmers. The Southern Pacific was a powerful force in California in 1880. They had their own private army of railroad detectives, and they were ruthless in using them. The Battle of Mussel Slough was a massacre. When Molly, Chris and the children moved back near Visalia in 1882 to start a farm, Chris was still on the railroad’s Hit List. So the Southern Pacific began stationing some of their railroad detectives near the Evans’ farm to keep a close watch on Chris and his family, a vigil which persisted for years, day and night. In fact one of those detectives, a man by the name of Will Smith, got to watching them so closely that he decided that he had fallen in love with Chris and Molly’s eldest daughter, Eva, and that he wanted to marry her. But Eva, even though she was only a young lady of fourteen years, was a young lady who knew her own mind. She told Smith that she wanted no part of Southern Pacific men in general and no part of him in particular. She used language that was quite colorful and descriptive, and Smith immediately became the butt of rude jokes from his fellow detectives as well as from the local sheriff and his deputies. Smith fumed, and quietly vowed revenge for this repudiation by this arrogant farm girl. Again, Fate’s persistent movement of Chris’s life generated ripples which would later wash back upon him as an angry tide. When the train robberies started happening in the San Joaquin Valley in the late 1880’s, the Southern Pacific decided that they would point the finger of blame at Chris and his friend John Sontag, even though they didn’t have a shred of evidence that either of them had ever been involved; even though they knew for a fact that the Dalton Gang had committed at least some of those train robberies. Typically a gang of masked men would board a train at a water stop, hold the train’s crew at gunpoint, blow open the baggage car with dynamite, and then ride off into the night with whatever spoils they could get and disappear before the train could make it to the nearest town to raise the alarm. This was the typical method of operation of the Dalton Gang, and one of the Dalton boys had already been arrested and charged with train robbery. Chris’s friend John Sontag had once worked for the Southern Pacific but had lost his job when one foot had been badly injured in an accident at work and as a result he could no longer move fast enough for his bosses at the railroad, so he was fired. He then went to work on the Evans’ farm doing odd jobs for Chris and Molly. The Southern Pacific apparently thought they made the perfect pair of Fall Guys – the Evans and Sontag Gang, they labeled them - and they told the sheriff that they wanted them arrested. That’s how powerful the Southern Pacific was in the late 1880’s – they could order a man’s arrest without that man having ever been charged or convicted of a crime. And the sheriff was in a situation where he either had to obey or face losing his job, so he rode out to the Evans’ farm with that railroad detective, Will Smith, to carry out his orders. On a fateful day when Molly wasn’t home a railroad detective with a festering grudge accompanied by a sheriff who did not have the courage to question his orders rode up to the family farm, dismounted, and walked into their living room with their guns drawn. No knock; no warrant; no evidence. The oldest daughter, Eva, ran out the back door to tell her father that two men were in the house threatening to either arrest him or shoot him. Unable to tolerate this threat to his family in his own home Chris picked up his own gun and went into the house to confront the two men who were no better than intruders in his eyes. Shots were exchanged and the railroad detective and sheriff took off back to town at full speed. In fact, they ran out so fast that they ran right by the horses they had left tied up in front of the farm and ran all the way back to town. Chris and John had a good laugh at this, but they knew the sheriff and detective would be back, and that they would bring a posse with them. So they packed up some supplies and took off for the mountains, back to the security of the Redwood Ranch, but leaving Molly and the children behind for their own safety should gunfire erupt around them once again. Molly Byrd was now thirty years old and deeply in love with her husband, the mother of eight more children after little Eugene had died, and she was no fool. She knew that the railroad would never give up on trying to destroy her family and kill her husband. She was right. The railroad posted a team of spies on Molly’s farm and posted a reward of ten thousand dollars on her husband’s head – Dead or Alive. The railroad had basically issued a Death Warrant on a man who had never been convicted of a crime; on a man for whom they had not the slightest evidence had ever been near one of their trains, much less had actually robbed one. After Chris’s hasty yet necessary departure Molly took on the tasks of running the family farm and raising eight children, while at the same time fending off frequent visits from the sheriff and suffering constant threats and intrusions from the railroad. Chris would sometimes sneak down to the farm and pay a visit to Molly at night and then leave before morning light. The railroad detectives also suspected Molly - and Eva - of sneaking food up to her husband in the mountains, and although they were very vocal in their accusations they could never prove anything. Molly found comfort in the continuous support of her mother – Grannie Byrd to the children – who lived nearby in Visalia. The High Country had called to Chris, offering safety. The Hand of Fate had steered his return to this High Country; and he and John Sontag were back up in these mountains that Chris loved so much; back amongst Chris’s friends who would now move to protect him from those who pursued him for a chance at quick wealth; back into temporary safety, but one huge step closer to the cold touch of the Hand of Glory which would forever scar him. For the Hand of Glory had no friends; but only victims, and he was now destined to be one. To be continued in Part Two . . .
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AuthorWith a degree in Anthropology and an avid interest in history, Tim Christensen has lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for many years. He has no cell phone or television, but manages, when not chopping firewood or shoveling snow, to keep himself entertained with a library of several thousand books. Archives
July 2017
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Sequoia Parks Conservancy, the official 501(c)(3) nonprofit partner of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (National Park Service) and Lake Kaweah (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), uses tax-deductible contributions to support these parks.
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Sequoia Parks Conservancy
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